Microsoft announces Zero Trust DNS private preview
To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use … ⌘ Read more

Nintendo issues DMCA takedown notice against over 8,500 Yuzu emulator repositories
The notice was filed on developer platform GitHub, which Nintendo claimed housed repositories that “offer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on ” which “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.” GitHub said it contacted the owners of the repositories to provide an “opportunity to make … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD is building a graphical installer
FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally. The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHa … ⌘ Read more

How to install the COSMIC desktop environment on Fedora 40
COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) is a new project by System76, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Pop!_OS. In this tutorial, we will give you an overview about COSMIC DE and its features, and then we will walk you through the steps to install COSMIC Desktop Environment in the latest Fedora 40 Linux system. ↫ Senthilkumar Palani at OSTechNix A very easy way to try out the current pre-alpha state of CO … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft overhaul treats security as ‘top priority’ after a series of failures
Microsoft is making security its number one priority for every employee, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. After a scathing report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board recently concluded that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul,” it’s doing just that by outlining a set of security principles and goals that are tied … ⌘ Read more

RISC OS Open 5.30 arrives with Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi support
This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. … ⌘ Read more

The BASIC programming language turns 60
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe. Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing a … ⌘ Read more

Inside the Snapdragon 855’s iGPU
Qualcomm’s Adreno 6xx architecture has been superseded Adreno 7xx, but it’s still used in countless devices, including the current-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Here, I’ll be looking at the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855. Zarif98 on Reddit kindly provided a OnePlus 7 Pro, and I’ll be using that to check out Adreno 640. Compared to the older Snapdragon 821’s Adreno 530, Adreno 640 dramatically increases compute throughput while still working within a very constraine … ⌘ Read more

At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down
Years of accumulated security debt at Microsoft are seemingly crashing down upon the company in a manner that many critics warned about, but few ever believed would actually come to light.  Microsoft is an entrenched enterprise provider, owning nearly one-quarter of the global cloud infrastructure services market and, as of Q1 last year, nearly 20% of the worldwide SaaS application market, according to Synergy Research Gr … ⌘ Read more

Chinese Tencent-owned company Riot Games installs rootkit on every League of Legends players’ computer
With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vang … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint: non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together in the face of libadwaita
Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applicati … ⌘ Read more

Redox gets USB HID support
Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware. … ⌘ Read more

You can’t just assume UTF-8
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development. However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other … ⌘ Read more

A few facts about POSIX
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. ↫ vorakl While POSI … ⌘ Read more

RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback
Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we’re still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android’s Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that “remove ACK’s suppo … ⌘ Read more

JMP: this week’s sponsor
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the fe … ⌘ Read more

9front “DO NOT INSTALL” released
There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more. I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more … ⌘ Read more

run0: a systemd-based, more secure replacement for sudo
Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems with sudo, which basically come down to that it’s a large SUID binary, meaning it consists of privileged code that unprivileged users can run from their own context. This … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft At Work
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eve … ⌘ Read more

The first video game, Spacewar!, on the DEC PDP-1 in your browser
This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”. Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen … ⌘ Read more

Windows NT and NetWare on PA-RISC, and a HP-UX port to x86
Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann’s invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP’s workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects and products. Weissmann’s been doing some serious digging, and has unearthed details about a number of essentially forgotten operating system efforts. First, it tur … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Foundation in financial trouble
As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual incom … ⌘ Read more

A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I’ve started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It’s been recommended to me for years, so I’m finally getting around to checking it out. There’s a lot to like if you come from BSD, which we’ll dig into here. ↫ Ruben Schade Just a quick look at this unexpectedly popular Linux distribution that really has its own identity. ⌘ Read more

Sculpt OS 24.04 released with initial suspend/resume support, new audio stack, and much more
The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it’s hard to know where to begin. One of the biggest new features is support for suspend/resume, an experimental feature for now, for wh … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft intends to record everything you do on your PC for “AI” processing
Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you’re … ⌘ Read more